Smoke and Mirrors, Then Growth.

My longing for Italy is unconventional. It’s not your fantasy trip of a lifetime to eat pray love your way through all the stereotypes, and it’s not nostalgia for my Italian upbringing, either. My wildest dream is to relive Italy the same way I did growing up, but with different outcomes. It’s as if I lost at a game I didn’t even know I was playing, and now I want a rematch. Is that even possible? To relive a life twice?

How fortunate I feel to have grown up in a small Italian town in the northern countryside is rekindled every time I meet someone who wants to hear my story, but that spark disappears at the thought of some of the details in my coming of age. On the surface, soccer games, family gatherings, strolls downtown with friends, breathtaking art, beautiful fashion, and a clear view of the alps every morning from my living room window is what dreams are made of, supposedly.

I don’t know when I began to dissociate from my surroundings. Maybe it was a slow process that started as soon as this mixed Italian and African American kid first set foot in her Italian elementary school. To become the complete opposite of my extroverted 8-year-old self must have taken an immense toll on me in ways I can’t explain, but I do consider my dissociation a “fuck you” mental response to assimilation – which clearly isn’t the universal solution to social acceptance. It took a long time to learn what being my full self meant.

Since the hardest part of writing is being honest – a terrifying prospect for a people-pleaser like me who has finally learned not to care about what others think – my question is, where does honesty take us? Mentally. Physically.

Being honest with myself has played a key role in helping me understand my identity, which has allowed me to welcome all of my nuances, and that of the people around me, but it came at a price, which I paid, by leaving everything I knew to start over again.

Fluidity in identity is real, constantly changing and evolving, just like my answers to the question Where are you from? Or, more intimately, Who am I? Answers directly linked to my personal journey, in the beginning I was American, then absolutely Italian all throughout my twenties, then Italian American – with a strong emphasis on Italian – in my thirties. Now, maybe I’m nothing and everything, all at once, and there is something freeing at this thought. It kind of means that I know who I am and I’ve lived my experiences, regardless of what you think or know, and I have nothing to prove. There is no box.

Honesty has lead me to create Accento, and it has lead me to finally write this newsletter. Although it will be inevitable to share some of my personal life in order for some of my thoughts to come through, I don’t want this newsletter to be about me. I’m a big fan – huge – of productivity, and bringing up the past is counterproductive on so many levels. Mainly because there is no changing it. I want this newsletter to be about us. Me and you. I hope that by sharing some of my thoughts, and the process behind my work, I can find my people. Creative thinkers, misfits in their approach and ideas, maybe Third Culture, maybe not. And since we are being honest here, with all the hardships this younger generation of Italians is enduring in a country that doesn’t know how to envision the future, but notoriously looks back, I want to be here for them. For us. When I think about reliving Italy the same way I did growing up, but with different outcomes, it means to have the tools to be able to love myself and address negativity right when it’s happening. Maybe this newsletter can be someone’s tool. A stream of consciousness that helps us be ourselves, without having to worry about an outside gaze, for now.

For a skeptic like me, there is no explaining why I’m hopeful for the future, but ever since I was a child, deep down I always knew that if I could help it, everything was going to be alright. With this newsletter I want to dream up the future. I have visions of a world that might as well be utopia, but if we can all imagine it, I think that’s quite the start. 

Growth feels good, and this might be the rematch.